Sitting at the table, trying to hide, unnoticed, behind the centrepiece, got me to thinking about the language of flowers. Held up as a silent dialogue in the Victorian era, if you gave someone flowers with your right hand it was ‘yes’, but if the left was proffered, then ‘no’.

If you gave a bouquet that was wilted, then the message was probably obvious. The flowers before me were starting to wi...

It was the severed finger on her shoulder.

The 0s and 1s blinked patiently. Or at least in the pretense of patience. It knew humans blink when they are nervous, and computed, ‘how endearing’.

There’s nothing as placid as a machine. But can a machine be duplicitous, mischievous?

A scene of city life rolled off across the screen, amusingly beautiful, almost a moving artwork. The greys merged into...

I’ve been thinking about heartbreak lately, in all its guises. Forgotten love, unrequited love, partial love, love on the rocks, cheated love.

But we can fool ourselves into thinking anything, can’t we? And we do it so often, we don’t even notice most of the time. Before we invented clocks, we could listen to the rhythm of the world with greater accuracy, greater feeling.

As a child, when I had...

Sitting in her room, she was trying to work out what she had done wrong. ‘Again?’, she quietly wondered, ‘How could it be happening again?

It was like being in a glass box, the water was slowly pouring in. There was no way out and the end felt inevitable.

But if you could change one thing from the past, would it work, would it help you out of the mess you’d gotten yourself into? And what would y...

It was a small thing, really

In the cafe,

Hardly hearing me.

I held out a feather, soft

Not really useful, 

But holding it up.

Whether you took it or not

Is by the by. 

What mattered was the difference

Between true and lie.

To ourselves, to each other

We know the answers,

Aren’t willing to believe them.

We know the timing isn’t perfect

Yet we stop at the meaning, 

We see it, congealing.

I st...

A single line, that’s all it was, written on the page like it was a hastily scrawled note to a partner, when you’d say something like ‘Just gone out to the shops’.

However, this was something that had been told to me in confidence, and it was a line so singularly odd that I had written it down, and then carelessly left it on a table in the café. 

I never normally do this, I treat my client note...

It was like I’d forgotten /

All those times you were nice to me.

You’d hold my hand

You’d ask how I was

You’d smile and say,

I was an angel. 

And then I remembered /

All those times my mind was elsewhere.

How he’d kissed me

How he’d whispered 

How he’d pause the now,

But I’d be regret.

Love, it’s impossible /

We can’t hold onto love squandered.

Me wanting to keep

Me hoping I’d see

Me hoping I’d ...

It's like the sun can’t quite break through, the hills are too steep, the branches tangled up, and the light is caught between the cusp. Betwixt the night and day, light is matted, woven together by absence or by presence, and it’s the feeling of what might be in those negative spaces, it’s comforting, but also it’s haunting.

The castle like a ghostly ship - my mind wanders, but what of it? Is it...

I do belong to you, she said.

Her hands slipping clay, 

Brow furrowed

Instead.

Each carve through her fingers.

He watched and dismayed,

Bespoke yet unreal

Virtuosity.

The smell of earth, ware, and fire.

Revolving on a wheel,

It’s art; It’s desire 

Speaking.

The lie lay like a baking pot

Between hearth and iron

She wasn’t his at all,

Lion.

—-

“If this is not a self-portrait it is because when ...

What did you do?

Laid it bare on the table

One thought gone

The timing, a label.

And I paused -

What did you do?

It was noon though

Sky seemed so, so.

It creased into being

Like so many scars

What did you do?

Again, then I said - 

I did it. I did do. 

I had to - but did you?...